You'd think a hard disk drive was a hard disk drive, and there would be little to distinguish one from the next.

Out of the box, the first thing to strike me about the Western Digital's My Passport Edge was its size.

It's only 12.8mm thick, 110mm long and 81.6mm wide, which makes it slightly shorter than a smartphone and a little bit wider. Tiny for a massive 500GB of storage.

This model has a 5 gigabits per second USB 3.0 connector which means its data transfer rates, when plugged into the latest computer hardware, can theoretically be 10 times the speed of USB 2.0 480MB per second devices.

For some reason Western Digital only claims its USB 3.0 is three times faster.

I don't have any USB 3.0 machines to test this on, so fortunately this drive is backwards compatible and performed more than adequately on my range of machines.

With such capacity, this hard disk drive makes a great backup device for all of your personal files, but its size also makes it ideal for chucking in your laptop bag to act as extra storage.

The built-in Western Digital Security software can be used to set password protection on your data.